INNER SPACES IN CINEMA: HOW CINEMA DESIGNS INTERIORS TO REFLECT THE HEART OF ITS CHARACTERS

By Ahona

One of the things you learn to define as a literature student is the difference between place and space. Dictionaries will trick you by using them interchangeably, and the difference between them is tricky. Ambiguous. Practically impossible to define satisfactorily. But in very basic terms, a space is expansive, often undefined, generic. Railway stations are spaces. But that particular station in your town is a place. A place is what you put as the location when you want to book a cab. Space is what people ask for, sometimes, when they are breaking up. Your friend wants to come over, your house is a meeting place. Your friend opens up to you, because you are their safe space. Spaces can mean so many things your imagination is your safe space, so is your friend, your terrace is your private space, so is that spot on your couch that you prefer, your heart is a conflicted space, so is your identity. It is then obvious why space, as a component, is so central to cinema. The frame is a space where the story plays out, limited in terms of its physical dimension and expansive in terms of the story it contains (frames are one of those things that can never be placed). Cinema is made through the intertwining of space and time. It stands to reason then, that spaces will mean so much more than what is visually represented. A room in a film is never just a room. It is a structure that reflects its inhabitants. In many ways, internal spaces have a deeper connection to the characters than external spaces. Obviously your house takes to your taste more than that road in your neighbourhood does. Your home is more you than a railway station or a park. Most of us do not realise the ways in which we shape our homes to reflect our hearts. Someone leaves the keys where they are not supposed to leave it. Someone straightens the pillows. Someone walks past the dusty window railings, briefly touching a curve, collecting dust on their fingers. And the house retains the memory of their touch, there's no dust on that particular spot. The space of an absent-minded contact. Proof of life on dust. That proof is a space too. So is humanity - proof of life on dust. Some of my favourite filmmakers sculpt these spaces to present them as extensions of the character's heart - Eric Rohmer, Satyajit Ray, Chantal Akerman, to name a few of them. The rooms in their films are not designed generically. The rooms have meanings. The rooms look like they have been lived in, like they are rooms with a past. Bong Joon-ho is a master space sculptor too Parasite, for example, thrives on the differences between the rich house and the poor house. Of course this effort is collaborative. You would need the set designer, director, cinematographer, actor and producer to think cohesively on the matter - the mise-en-scène, as it is called (mise-en-scène is everything that you see in a frame, from set design to the positions of actors). I am thinking of a fairly significant Indian film that operates through the interconnections between space and mind. Haider is a brilliant film on many counts. It is by far one of the finest contemporary adaptations of Shakespeare. It is almost frightful in its courage to reflect political scenarios. It understands identity, insanity and space in between those two. And it represents that space through homes. If you remember the film, you would recall the first instance where we see certain moments of Haider's impending brokenness. An older Haider returns to find his house almost razed to the ground, and desperately tries to piece it back together. That space of his childhood, thus desecrated and rotting in ruins, triggers the first fracture in him if he can't piece this house together, his childhood is broken too. What do people with broken childhoods become? Haider becomes a series of fractures. He goes to meet his mother, Ghazala. She is sitting in a room washed in sunlight with an intricate carpet on the floor, ornate woodwork on the walls, coloured in deep, rich hues.

This structured-ness of this room collides with the broken home Haider has seen suddenly he cannot reconcile his mother with his childhood. His mother's laughing, singing. His childhood is broken, in ruins. That is the second fracture. This is the ingenuity of Bhardwaj's storytelling. On each level he builds up to the complete disintegration of Haider's psyche - that build-up is subtle enough for the final act to be explosive. And that build- up is mediated by those spaces. It is befitting that the most telling scene in the film is in a room, where Haider speaks to Ghazala, as she gets ready for her marriage to Khurram. I particularly like how the film shows the split in their relationship and their identities through literally splitting their image - them and their reflections on the mirror (also a deeply interior space, in that it allows you to contemplate your own image). Their brokenness is manifested in that split image. It correlates our inner spaces with our inner selves. Our homes reflect us in ways we do not realise, I had mentioned earlier. Perhaps that broken home of his childhood reflected who Haider was yet to become. Perhaps it saw his brokenness before he saw it in himself. This image in the mirror isn't his only reflection. That broken home is the other one.